Hi,<br><br>I am running into an issue with paths and unicode strings in IPython. Currently, in 99% of IPython&#39;s code base<br>we use str for *everything*. But, there are a few things that are unicode (get_ipython_dir, get_home_dir, some others).<br>
The inconsistency is giving me some trouble and I need to decide if I should be using str or unicode for files, paths, dirs.<br><br>So, I would like us to come up with a more consistent plan for unicode/str. This is especially relevant for the Python 3.0<br>
transition, where the str type goes away (only unicode and bytes).<br><br>Here is what I am thinking:<br><br>* Sometimes soon, we begin to do the transition from str-&gt; unicode. <br>Basically, 99% of strings in IPython should be unicode. That is<br>
everything that is not a path, file, directory, etc.<br><br>* Starting now, every path, filename, etc should be unicode? I am not as sure about this one...<br>The Python 3 docs here:<br><br><a href="http://docs.python.org/3.1/library/os.path.html">http://docs.python.org/3.1/library/os.path.html</a><br>
<br>say the most general thing is to use bytes on unix/linux/os x and unicode on Windows for paths,<br>files, dirs. That seems like a huge pain though and would mean we have to provide some sort <br>of abstraction layer for these things. It would be so nice to simply use unicode everywhere.<br>
But, that means there are some paths that we can&#39;t represent on unix.<br><br>Does anyone have experience with Python 3.0 in this regard yet?<br><br>Cheers,<br><br>Brian<br><br><br>